


Up next - Mariya Takeuchi 竹内 まりや Plastic Love

by SuperChickenDX



Category: Kamen Rider Gaim
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Guilt, Past Relationship(s), Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-06 21:48:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14656893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperChickenDX/pseuds/SuperChickenDX
Summary: If you're awake past four in the morning then you know that some mistakes were made





	Up next - Mariya Takeuchi 竹内 まりや Plastic Love

He’s ended up in a bad part of Youtube again, but it’s too late to back out. If he looks away from the screen right now his brain will fill up with his own memories and he can’t take it tonight, he can’t, so Takatora is slumped in his chair clicking the next recommended video and the next, unless the title contains Yggdrasil or Truth or something like that. And there’s a lot of them here. They can fuck off. He came here to watch videos of his little brother smiling in a way he hasn’t in years, and on the way, he’s re-learning the names of the dead.  
  
It’s the absolute fucking least he can do for them.  
  
There’s Ryoji Hase, at the centre of Raid Wild, whose blood is thick on Takatora’s hands. If Takatora had kept his poise, if he just hadn’t gotten angry, if he’d been a fucking adult about it, then he wouldn’t have broken Hase’s driver. And Hase wouldn’t have ended up as an Inves. Hell, he should have at least been able to get the shot off quickly and cleanly after it had become clear that. Well. That it would be necessary.  
  
Fondly watching Hase’s dance from the other side of the stage is the patissier, Jonouchi Hideyasu. His desserts are excellent. Oren refuses to charge Takatora whenever he goes to Charmant, and it feels awkward enough that he would avoid the place entirely, but Takatora feels honour-bound to go and tip four times over anyway. The cakes are good, and even if it’s a paltry compensation for what he’s done, he needs to pay some reparations for killing Jonouchi’s boyfriend. Or well, that’s what he’d heard about them from Mitsuzane.  
  
Next next next. If Takatora closes his eyes he can see Jonouchi’s hope shattering. Next.  
  
Here’s Team Baron. He doesn’t really like their dance style. It looks too heavy and sharp next to Gaim, who bounce and flow and always have fun. He’s heard that Kumon Kaito was rather a miserable and angry man. He can believe that most of the time, but every so often he sees one particular video crop up, in which Kumon is dancing with absolute childish joy and abandon alongside his team and Mai Takatsukasa and Kouta Kazaraba, limbs nowhere near co-ordinated. This side of Kumon had been there, and he’d barely shown it, because… The story of Kumon’s father worked its way to him as rumours. And that was Takatora’s father’s sin, but he’d inherited it with Yggdrasill.  
  
Yggdrasill was good at creating people who kill those closest to them.  
  
Primary fucking product.  
  
Autoplay moves him on to one of Gaim’s dances.  
  
There’s poor dead Yuya Sumii, the old leader of Team Gaim, dancing a solo with his team momentarily posed still, and then they all jump together and keep dancing. Mitsuzane is over to the left side and this video must have been taken was when he was very much a baby on the team because he’s all nerves and his feet are half a beat behind, trying to watch and copy Mai Takatsukasa next to him. She’s looking after him, Takatora is sure, from the way she keeps checking over her shoulder. If he keeps focusing on her then Takatora’s sure he’ll cry.  
  
So he tears his eyes away, and there’s Kouta Kazaraba on the right.  
  
He’s a good dancer.  
  
_Mitsuzane, do you miss him?_ he’d asked, and _No, I don’t miss him,_ had been the entirely unhelpful response, because Takatora didn’t even know him, and he missed Kouta terrifically, but Mitsuzane saying _Because we’ll meet again somewhere, someday_ would never led into a conversation about Kouta in which Takatora didn’t end up being suspected of something monumentally stupid. And anyway, he knows Mitsuzane does miss him. He’s sure that Mitsuzane misses Kouta more than Mai. There’s the awful trauma of- of her murder, of course, but the sheer hopefulness that Kouta brought is still missing from the world, and Takatora’s never found anything since that could compare, even if before-  
  
It’s fine. It’s fine, because Kouta Kazaraba is worlds away, not dead but inaccessible, so he’s safe. He’s safe in every way. And if Kouta comes back, impossibly, then Takatora would step aside for Mitsuzane’s sake, and that’s fine too because Kouta is a good person and not a _fucking_ snake-  
  
He closes the window in frustration, cutting off the music a few seconds after the beat dropped.  
  
He’d decided that he was never going to think about that man, or Touka, or romance or sex ever again. It was bad for him, and that had been proved every time he’d found it, so he didn’t want to find it here, in the same video in which his happy little brother still lives, half-hidden in the easy sway of Kouta Kazaraba’s hips.  
  
Enough, enough of all this. Takatora closes his laptop and pulls his headphones off and feels all the bones in his back groan as he stretches. It’s already past five in the morning, so what if he just went and fucking ate breakfast? And he’ll turn up to work without having slept again, but at least nobody could accuse him of sleeping easily on the bed he’d fucking made for himself. Not that it would be an excuse for fucking up some contract somewhere, probably ruining a dozen lives in the process, but at this point not setting out to actively murder billions of people was an improvement, so…  
  
He walks into the kitchen and jumps because suddenly there’s Mitsuzane, jar of chocolate spread in one hand, spoon in mouth, eyes wide.  
  
“Mitsuzane.”  
  
Mitsuzane pulls the spoon out of his mouth slowly.  
  
“Good morning, Takatora,” he says, voice absolutely level. There’s chocolate around his mouth.  
  
Takatora’s brain scrambles for words, or, just, concepts. “… Would you like… something with that? Toast? Pancakes?”  
  
Mitsuzane nods.  
  
Takatora nods. “Okay. We’ll make pancakes for breakfast.”  
  
He starts opening cupboards, trying to find wherever the measuring jugs and mixing bowls are, while Mitsuzane puts down his jar and spoon and gets ingredients out. Of course his brother wasn’t sleeping properly either, but here Mitsuzane was in the middle of the night- well only one of them was dropping a whisk on the floor, good move, so maybe one of them had the right idea about coping mechanisms. He’d definitely have gotten medical help for the situation long ago, if he thought there was a therapist alive who could deal with the problems they both had.  
  
Mitsuzane put the flour and milk down hard on the counter top, laid the eggs down softly. “Did you, uh, want chocolate on yours?”  
  
“No, you’ve effectively licked the inside of the jar, Mitsuzane. I’ll try not to think about how many times you’ve done that before.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“Did you do it to any of the jam?”  
  
“… I might have done it to some of the jam.”  
  
Takatora sets down the metal bowl onto the scale with a pointed clink. “Mitsuzane.”  
  
“The strawberry’s clean! And there’s a fresh jar of marmalade in the cupboard. Or there’s lem-”  
  
But Mistuzane stopping himself halfway through isn’t fast enough, and. He doesn’t want to eat marmalade right now. He doesn’t want the strawberry. He doesn’t want any of that. Fruit is sour.  
  
Takatora’s frozen in place, about to tip the flour bag.  
  
He has to break the silence somehow.  
  
“Just-  
  
“If I scrape the top layer off the chocolate then it should be okay.”  
  
Takatora sighs one exhausted sigh and goes back to measuring out flour, watching it puff into the air as it hits the bowl on the scale. “Use a clean spoon, at least.”  
  
“Yes, Takatora.”  
  
“And can you get the coffee out while you’re over there?” he asks as he’s fumbling with the eggs, and he’s suddenly relieved thinking about the taste, and how coffee will make him feel workably human again. Maybe it’s fine. Maybe he’ll get through the day without having to make any hard decisions, and he’ll come home at a reasonable time and go to bed instead of going to Charmant. Who needs a fancy cake anyway? What he and Mitsuzane are going to make together right here, right now, is going to b-  
  
Shit.  
  
He doesn’t even understand why the egg broke on the wrong side of the bowl. So he just looks at it as it spreads. It’s gone all over the counter. And his hand.  
  
It’s all a mess.  
  
And it’s fine, because Mitsuzane breaks into hysterical laughter, and after a few seconds, so does he.

**Author's Note:**

> The lines about Micchy not missing Kouta are from Gaim Final Stage. i didn't go back and check anything else though. don't @ me


End file.
